Irish City of Belfast launches its own digital currency

Another City joins the Reward token mechanism for its citizens

The concept of a local currency is not a new one. The first one to introduce such a currency is the Canadian city of Calgary — dubbed as ‘Calgary Digital Dollar’ in December of 2018. Taking inspiration from the Canadian city’s experiment, Vienna, a major European city introduced a digital token called Calgary Dollar, “ which has been in existence since 1996 and is used alongside the Federally controlled Canadian Dollar to create a value chain for the local economy that stays within the domestic ecosystem.

With the digital transformation taking place in the global ecosystems & the popularity of the mainstream Cryptocurrencies, Calgary rebranded & introduced the digital version called the ‘Vienna token. ‘ Announced earlier this year, the reward token was conceptualized in collaboration between the City of Vienna & the Vienna University of Economics and Business — Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics.

The city is looking eventually at developing a reward token ecosystem, where the citizens are not only incentivized for simple things like riding a bike or providing feedback about city services but are able to use those tokens on things like parking tickets etc.